The Urban Dweller’s Relationship To Nature

Certainly, many urban gardeners are interested in the environmental (i.e. moral) consequences of city growing. The eco-ethical dream of those like Folke Günther is that urban gardening could move beyond aesthetic concerns and really help feed the world’s urban poor. For now, though, the movement outside my window is not subsistence farming. No one in Brooklyn is going to starve without urban gardens. Even so, urban gardeners are earnest in their agricultural pursuits. I think most commercial farmers would be pretty surprised to see how much children in Prospect Park have learned about irrigation techniques. What’s surely exciting is that urban gardeners have us imagining cities as we’ve never seen them, that move beyond public parks and designated green zones: rooftop apple-picking, gardens in school cafeterias, skyscrapers that emerge out of forests. The modern city as the new Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Gardens and still Babylon, too

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